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In the last few days I've been fortunate to witness an interesting chapter
in the Internet's history, and I'm trying to compile a timeline of what has
happened while the memories are still reasonably fresh. This is incomplete
and a work in progress; I'll be updating it, and not necessarily in
chronological order, as I dig up other things worth including. Some of my
TODO markers may remain. But here goes.

I have just posted Tsukurimashou
0.9, the latest version of my Japanese-language font project.
After almost a year in development since the last version, this one contains
1754 kanji, including all through Grade Four and 100 from Grade Five (a
little more than half of the 185 assigned to that grade). This version also
includes extensive infrastructure changes, most notably a bundled
interpreter for the FontForge native scripting language, intended to provide
insurance of future support as mainline FontForge moves further and further
away from that language.

The future of Tsukurimashou development may be tangled, as my commitments
and priorities change with my upcoming move to Denmark. This 0.9 release was
produced in a bit of a rush to get something out the door before I pack up
my computer for shipment. I don't know when I will next get a change to
work on it more, but that will be at least two months from now. You can do
your bit to support continued work on Tsukurimashou by building it, using
it, and above all by writing about it. What the project needs most of all
is attention.

FontAnvil is a script language interpreter for manipulating fonts.
FontAnvil is substantially compatible with the PfaEdit/FontForge native
scripting language, but FontAnvil is intended for non-interactive use; for
instance, invocation from the build systems of font packages like
Tsukurimashou. To better serve font package build systems in general and
Tsukurimashou in particular, FontAnvil has no GUI and, to a reasonable
extent, avoids dependencies on external packages.

I've posted Tsukurimashou
0.8, the latest version of my Japanese-language font project. This
version contains 1502 kanji, including all through Grade Four. There are
relatively few infrastructure changes for the fonts in this version, but Kleknev is new in this release
(still at alpha status) and IDSgrep
0.4, released a few days ago and included in this package, contains
some new and exciting speed enhancements.

UPDATE: I presented Tsukurimashou at TUG 2013 in Tokyo this October.
You can read my
slides (PDF file) on the conference Web site, and see some
photos from my trip in my photo gallery. The paper will appear in
TUGboat 2013.3, which will be posted on TUG's Web site
(initially members-only, eventually open-access, or visit your library) in
the near future.

I'm very happy to announce the release of version
0.7 of Tsukurimashou, my Japanese-language font project. That is a
link to the release page for the source code package on SourceForge.JP; see
also the complete list
of downloadable files and the project home page. This has
been almost nine months in the making, and as I said on Twitter, the yak
hair is thick on the floor. Release notes below the cut.

It's a very common pattern in the Han writing system that a character
will be made of two parts that are themselves characters, or at least
elements resembling characters, placed one above the other or one next to
the other. For instance, 音 (sound) can be split into 立 (stand up) above
日 (day); and 村 (village) can be split into 木 (tree) next to 寸 (inch).
This kind of structure can be nested, as in 語 (language).
One can do a sort of gematria with the meanings, (what exactly
is the deep significance of "village = tree + inch"?) but that's not the
direction I'm interested in going today.
Here's the thing: in the Tsukurimashou
project, these two ways of constructing characters each correspond to a
piece of code that's invoked many times throughout the system, and I thought
it would be interesting to look at how often the different parameter values
are used.

I posted version
0.3 of IDSgrep last night; follow the link to download it from
SourceForge.JP. As you may recall, IDSgrep is my kanji structural-query
software. Some of the ideas behind it were discussed on this Web log back in December. The general
idea is that this is software to answer queries about layout and visual
components of Han-script (Japanese, Chinese, etc.) characters.

The main new things in version 0.3 are support for regular expression
searches; the inclusion of a bundled dictionary (based on the IDS
decompositions of the CHISE project);
and a "cooked" output mode.

At this point I think IDSgrep as such - the search program - is basically
finished. As bug reports and practical experience accumulate, there may
eventually be a 0.4 or 1.0 release, but all the features I think it needs to
have are now in place and it seems to serve pretty well the original
purpose for which I needed to develop it.

At long last, I've completed the 0.6 release of the Tsukurimashou fonts (project home page). This one contains 1110 kanji, including all those taught in the Japanese school system through Grade Three. Also new in this release are experimental italics and integration with my IDSgrep structural-query software (which has its own, separate release series). Downloads: source code; precompiled fonts; demo PDF files.

I've released a new version of the Tsukurimashou fonts (project home page). This one contains 776 kanji, including all those taught in the Japanese school system through Grade Two and half of Grade Three. The bigger news, however, is that I've also added a set of fonts for the Korean hangul writing system. Those should now be beta quality - you should now be able to write the standard modern Korean language in its entirety. Downloads: source code; precompiled fonts; demo PDF files.

These fonts are far enough along now that I'd really like to create a bit of "buzz" around them; that's part of the sneaky plan behind my recent technical postings about my experiences building the fonts. I'm hoping that a lot of people will read those, and, especially, share them on systems like Twitter and the other one. In the new year, after I've posted a couple more (I'm aiming for weekly technical postings), I'll evaluate whether they are attracting third-party traffic and whether I want to continue them. They take up time I could be spending on writing code, but having people use the software is important too.

I've just posted the second release of the Tsukurimashou font family - now with 198 kanji, including the 80 Grade One jouyou kanji. You, too, can write like a six-year-old! Also new in this version is a fancy build system.

Download the source package (ZIP) which includes four ready-made OpenType font files, or preview it by looking at the demo PDF (which is not much changed from last version) and the kanji chart.

More commentary probable at some future date; for the moment I've already used up today's word quota writing the package documentation.

I'm pleased to announce the first release of the Tsukurimashou font family. The user's manual and demo is available as a PDF file; so is the complete package in bzipped TAR and ZIP formats. Precompiled OpenType fonts, compatible with all currently-popular typesetting systems, are included in those packages for two styles (Tsukurimashou Kaku and Mincho). Other styles you'll have to compile yourself.

These fonts are released with source code under the GNU GPL version 3 with font-embedding clarification. The current version contains the full repertoire of ISO Latin-1, hiragana, and katakana; more characters are on the way.

This is my last posting from the desktop machine before I take it down to pack - a little earlier than I'd first planned, but I'm trying to get my packing done with as much safety margin as possible and now that the paper deadlines are past, I don't need the main computer to be online in this location any longer. I can use my laptop for networking in the next few days before my move.

Since my last Japanese lesson on the 10th, I'm on my own as far as continuing my studies, and one thing I'm doing is translating song lyrics. Another I might do is post entries on the Japanese side of this site. Anyway, although I'm not promising to share much or any of whatever is created by my learning process - it depends very much on amount and nature of reader response - I'm going to post a song translation in this entry. It seems appropriate.

I added the Latin alphabet, so far only the uppercase letters, to Tsukurimashou, and this brings it to a point where I feel okay about releasing a demo PDF file, so y'all can download it and take a closer look at my handiwork.

Some things to remember:

The main purpose of this typeface family is as a pedagogical exercise. It's the process of creation that is more important than the finished product. Hence the name.

It's designed for the Japanese language. Typesetting modern Japanese requires having the glyphs for English too, but that doesn't mean the fonts are usable for general English-language typesetting. In particular, this is a monospace font with a choice of typesetting one character per perfectly square box, or two. That'll make it look unnaturally extended or compressed if you use it to typeset English text of more than a word or two at a time.

All five styles shown are generated from the same source code by tweaking a few parameters, and many other styles not shown in the demo can easily be generated with very little extra work.

Just a note for long-time readers: as you can see, I've been gradually posting material copied over from the old site. I don't have a clear handle on what does or doesn't appear in the RSS feeds, nor what RSS readers (and syndicators such as Facebook and Livejournal) do with backdated entries. I'm going to post some old material as new postings, with or without notes at the top mentioning that it's reposted; other old material will be posted under its original date, and in that case it most likely won't appear in your reader. The "archive" links don't seem to work for old material, but that may be fixed at some point, and it remains accessible through the page-by-page and tag-based navigation as well as the search.

I'd like to remind you that I've also created a Japanese-language section. Items from that will not appear in the main RSS feed through which you're reading this entry; if you want to subscribe to it, you have to subscribe that page's RSS feed separately. The two share the search feature and tag cloud, but most other things are separated. I expect traffic on the Japanese side to be low but nonzero; subject matter will be determined by my language skill as it advances, but at the moment it'll be pretty elementary. Some day I'd like to be able to translate a lot of my "greatest hits" material, but my writing style in English leans heavily on technical skill in the language. It would be hard even for a native speaker to translate my work and have it still sound like my work, and it'll be a long time before I reach the level where I can do that myself.